Jordan_U

Jordan_U , 2 months ago

One key problem with forced arbitration clauses is that company chooses and pays the "neutral" arbiter, who is inevitably biased against the consumer.

Jordan_U , 2 months ago

Find the mutual aid networks in your community and join / support them.

Just generally be in community with those around you.

Join or form local weekly protests for a permanent ceasefire.

Join a union and encourage others to. Help ensure that your union has enough resources to provide support for more vulnerable members when they need to strike.

Run for local office.

Jordan_U , 2 months ago

More than a decade ago a user came into #ubuntu-server on Freenode (now libera.chat ) and said that they had accidentally run "rm -rf /* something*" in a root shell.

Note the errant space that made that a fatal mistake. I don't remember how far it actually got in deleting files, but all of /bin/ /sbin/ and /usr/ were gone.

He had 1 active ssh connection, and couldn't start another one.

It was a server that was "in production", was thousands of miles away from him, and which had no possibility for IPMI / remote hands.

Everyone (but me) in the channel said that he was just SoL and should just give up.

I stayed up most of the night helping him. I like challenges and I like helping people.

This was in the sysv-init (maybe upstart) days, and so a decent number of shell scripts were running, and using basic *nix commands.

We recovered the bash binary by running something along the lines of

bash_binary_contents="$( </proc/self/exe)"
printf "%s" > /tmp/bash

(If you can access "lsof" then "sudo lsof | grep deleted" will show you any files that are open, but also "deleted". You may be surprised at how many there are!)

But bash needed too many shared libraries to make that practical.

Somehow we were able to recover curl and chmod, after which I had him download busybox-static. From there we downloaded an Ubuntu LiveCD iso, loop mounted it, loop mounted the squashfs image inside the iso, and copied all of /bin/ , /sbin/ , /etc , and so on from there onto his root FS.

Then we re-installed missing packages, fixed up /etc/ (a lot of important daemons, including the one that was production critical, kept their configuration files open, and so we were able to use lsof to find the magic symlinks to them in /proc/$pid/fd/ and just cp them back into /etc/.

We were able to restart openssh-server, log in again, and I don't remember if we were brave enough to test rebooting.

But we fucking did it!

I am certainly getting a lot of details wrong from memory. It's all somewhere at irclogs.ubuntu.com though. My nick was / is Jordan_U.

I tried to find it once, and failed.

Jordan_U , 2 months ago

It's at least gotten a bit better.

There was a time when Photoshop and other programs used a copy-protection scheme that overwrote parts of grub, causing the user not to be able to boot Linux or Windows.

They knew about it, and just DGAF. I don't remember their exact FAQ response, but it was something along the lines of "Photoshop is incompatible with GRUB. Don't dual boot if you use Photoshop."

Grub still has code for BIOS based installs that uses reed-solomon error correction at boot time to allow grub to continue to function even if parts of its core.img were clobbered by shitty copy protection schemes for Windows software.

Jordan_U , 2 months ago

I quite happily run HAOS on my raspberry pi 3 to control the lights, my Roomba, and various other devices in my home.

Interacting with it via the home-assistant Android app, or the web interface, I'm never waiting for anything, and interacting via mosh is quite pleasant.

Part of what makes Linux nice is that you can use just what you need.

If what you need includes something like a web browser, then yes; 4 GiB of RAM is going to be a bad time, and 1 GiB is going to be unusable.

Jordan_U , 3 months ago

Do you throw away all your cables when new features are added?

Only when you start to own a device that uses one of those new features?

Jordan_U , 3 months ago

Development of the Wayland specification and multiple Wayland compositors is funded by the X.org foundation, and done largely by current and former Xorg developers / maintainers.

So it still works!

Jordan_U , 3 months ago

She works in "criminal justice" for the U.S. military.

You can be pedantic about the 'C' in ACAB applying, but the Bastard bit inescapably applies.

Jordan_U , 4 months ago

A concrete example of this is doctors and hospitals creating guidelines about how to triage care when ICUs were/are full because of unmitigated spread of COVID.

It is definitely an "interesting" phylisophical question to ask:

"If a long term ventilator user comes into the ICU, with the ventilator they own and brought from home, and they are less likely to survive than an otherwise healthy young man who needs a respirator due to COVID infection, is the morally best choice to steal the disabled person's ventilator (killing them) and use it to save the young man's life?"

The policy question that should be asked instead, and never really ways, is "How do we make sure that we never get to the point where we have so many people in the ICU from a preventable disease that we run out of respirators and need to start choosing who to let die?"

This is not just a hypothetical question:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/long-term-ventilator-users-lose-bid-revive-suit-over-ny-emergency-guidelines-2022-11-23/

Disabled people continue to plead with us for the bare minimum, like requiring doctors who work with immunocompromised patients to wear N95 respirators while treating those patients.

We continue to chose to stack more people on both sets of tracks instead.

Jordan_U , 4 months ago

This is a really weird point to argue about.

Jordan_U , 4 months ago

Roma.

G* has always been a slur.